Contrasting Cultures: The Fifties and the Sixties

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Contrasting Cultures The Fifties and the
Sixties

• -Key Concepts-

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I. The Fifties Affluence and Anxiety
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A. Life in the Suburbs

• Optimism and pessimism both characterized the
  50s
• Explosion of homebuilding during the decade
• Levittown
• Ease of financing for new homes
• Levittown uniformity

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A. Life in the Suburbs (cont.)

• Diversity under the surface at Levittown
• Post-war growth of American suburbs
• Dramatic population growth in the Sunbelt
• Increased mobility in the American population in
  general
• American car culture

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A. Life in the Suburbs (cont.)

• Post-War Baby Boom
• A new Consumer Revolution
• Origins of Fifties economic growth
• Real economic growth crossed class lines

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A. Life in the Suburbs (cont.)

• Age of the credit card arrived
• Leisure hours increased
• Growth of the middle class white-collar sector
• Big business kept getting bigger

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A. Life in the Suburbs (cont.)

• Changes in American shopping patterns
• Concerns with growing materialism
• The crucial role of advertising
• Doubts about the strength of national character

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B. Life in the Home

• Home became the focus of activities
• Togetherness
• Television image of family togetherness
• No encouragement of feminism after WWII
• Lifes ideal middle-class woman (1956)

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B. Life in the Home (cont.)

• The advice of baby doctor Benjamin Spock
• --The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care
  (1946)
• Number of working women doubled between 1940-1960
• --40 of all women and 33 of all married women
  worked outside of the home by 1960

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C. Religion and the Media

• Organized religion flourished in the 50s
• -- Church shopping
• The Power of Positive Thinking (1952)
• Fifties preaching avoided condemnation and
  controversy
• Symbols of 50s Religious Enthusiasm
• -- In God We Trust

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C. Religion and the Media (cont.)

• Religion and the Cold War
• Religion on television
• Neo-orthodoxy and critics of 50s religious
  culture
• Educational controversy during the decade

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C. Religion and the Media (cont.)

• Television became the largest growth area for an
  expanding American media
• --1946 7,000 sets
• --1960 50 million sets
• TVs impact on culture
• Advertising on TV
• Fifties television programming

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D. The Politics of the 1950s
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(1) The Election of 1952

• Competition for the Republican nomination
• Democrats nominated Governor Adlai Stevenson of
  Illinois
• The Campaign and Results
• -- I Like Ike
• Republicans failed to control Congress in the 50s

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(2) Dynamic Conservatism The Eisenhower
Presidency

• Eisenhowers background and personality
• Eisenhowers controversial cabinet
• Eisenhowers priority of budget cutting
• Extending the reach of the New Deal

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(2) Dynamic Conservatism (cont.)

• Eisenhowers heart attack and the election of
  1956
• Second Term problems
• Second Term accomplishments
• --Hawaii and Alaska statehood (1959)
• Eisenhowers Farewell Address
• -- military-industrial complex

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E. An Underlying Anxiety
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(1) Critics of Consumer Society

• Abundance of self-criticism in the 1950s
• David Riesmans The Lonely Crowd (1950)
• -- inner-directed vs. outer-directed
• Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman (1949)
• Other literary critiques of the 1950s

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(1) Critics of Consumer Society (cont.)

• Critique of American business in the 50s
• The art of Edward Hopper
• Art becomes increasingly abstract
• The subculture of the Beatniks
• Beatniks pursue personal versus social solutions
  to their anxieties

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(1) Critics of Consumer Society (cont.)

• Beat poet Allen Ginsberg
• -- Howl (1956)
• William Burroughs
• -- Naked Lunch (1959)
• Jack Kerouac
• -- On the Road (1957)
• Contrast with the Hippies
• Anti-authority movies
• The Elvis Revolution

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(2) The Second Red Scare

• House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)
• Presidential loyalty oaths (1947)
• The Alger Hiss affair (1948)
• The climate for McCarthyism
• --Ethel and Julius Rosenberg

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(2) The Second Red Scare (cont.)

• Communists in the State Department (February of
  1950)
• McCarthys tactics
• Growing fear of McCarthy in Washington, D.C.
• McCarthys attack on subversive books
• McCarthy and Eisenhower

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(2) The Second Red Scare (cont.)

• The Army-McCarthy Hearings (1954)
• --Army counsel Joseph Welch
• McCarthys demise
• Spirit of McCarthyism lived on
• Frozen dissent during the 1950s

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(3) Reaction to Sputnik

• Soviets launch Sputnik (October, 1957)
• American reaction to Sputnik
• NASA created (1958)
• Project Apollo and the race to the moon
• National Defense Education Act (1958)
• Commission on National Goals

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II. The Sixties Protest and Reaction
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A. The Politics of the 1960s
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(1) The Election of 1960

• Richard Nixon (R-Ca) vs. John F. Kennedy (D-Mass)
• The Kennedy family and political ambition
• -- Profiles in Courage (1956)
• Campaign issues and strategies
• Election Results

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(2) The New Frontier Under Kennedy

• Kennedy youthfulness and Cabinet appointments
• --Robert McNamara
• The Kennedy Style
• Difficulties in launching a domestic program
• --The Peace Corps (1961)
• Kennedys assassination (November 22, 1963)
• --The Camelot mystique

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B. Important Supreme Court Decisions of the
1960s

• Warren Court decisions continue to be
  controversial
• Prohibition of school prayer (1962)
• Gideon v. Wainwright (1963)
• Escobedo v. Illinois (1964)
• Miranda v. Arizona (1966)

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C. Life on College Campuses

• Boom in college enrollments
• A new adversarial culture attacking materialism
• Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
• -- participatory democracy
• --Founder Tom Hayden
• -- The New Left

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C. Life on College Campuses (cont.)

• Growth of the SDS
• Increasing radicalism and violence
• The Weathermen
• By 1971, the New Left was dead
• SDS as a symbol of youth in the 60s
• Still, SDS was a minority symbol of the era

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D. Student Revolt

• Roots of student protest
• The Free Speech Movement (1964)
• --Berkeley student leader Mario Savio
• Causes of campus unrest
• -- Dont trust anyone over thirty!
• First student teach-ins at the University of
  Michigan (1965)

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D. Student Revolt (cont.)

• Growing threat of the draft to college men
• Draft resistance and evasion
• Mass student protests at Central Park and the
  Pentagon (1967)
• Sit-ins at Columbia University (April, 1968)
• Major gains of the protest were educational

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E. The Cultural Revolution

• Much more pervasive and influential than the
  political revolution of the 60s
• Values challenged through physical appearance
• The rise and fall of communal living
• --Haight-Ashbury

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E. The Cultural Revolution (cont.)

• The Woodstock Music Festival (August, 1969)
• Protest music of the mid-60s
• --Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel

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E. The Cultural Revolution (cont.)

• Drug music and political radicalism of the late
  sixties
• -- Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
• -- You Say You Want a Revolution
• --Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane

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E. The Cultural Revolution (cont.)

• The role of drugs in the Counter-Culture
• --Dr. Timothy Leary
• The Yippies
• The Crippling of the Cultural Revolution
  (1969-1970)
• The commercialization of the Counter-Culture
• Environmentalism becomes the new student cause of
  the 70s

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F. Native American Nationalism

• The poor, different nationalities and homosexuals
  all emulated the Black Power movement
• The plight of Native Americans in the 60s
• Protest of sports mascots
• AIM and its takeover of Alcatraz (1969)
• Legal action taken

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G. Hispanic Nationalism

• Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers
  Association
• --boycott strategy
• Explosive growth of Hispanic American population
• -- Chicanos
• Campaign for educational opportunities and
  programs
• No more Frito Bandito

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H. Womens Liberation

• New wave of feminism grew out of other reform
  efforts
• Signs of gender inequality during the 60s
• Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique (1963)
• 1964 Civil Rights Act no job discrimination on
  the basis of sex

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H. Womens Liberation (cont.)

• Forms of protest by 60s women activists
• National Organization of Women (NOW1966)
• Division within the womens movement
• The Equal Rights Amendment (1972)
• Roe v. Wade (1973)
• The quiet revolution

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III. Comparisons of the Fifties and the Sixties?